Originally Posted by
eglnyt
Distributed technology on its own won't bring much more than hardware redundancy if you just put "old" ATC software on it.
Where do you get the application software that takes advantage? The problem with this market is twofold.
First it requires great investment by the software supplier for what is not much return, there aren't actually that many ANSPs to buy or licence it.
Second the market is dominated by a handful of large companies with an investment in 40 year old software to protect.
I know of an ANSP that needed to replace some ancillary software in the flight data area. The tenders were from the usual suspects plus a small software company. That tender was promising and would have brought more modern development processes but in the end it was marked down because of their lack of experience in the industry and knowledge of the standards applying to ATC software. The ANSP was worried that if there was a later issue the headlines would be even worse. A more modern version of nobody got sacked for buying IBM.
The solution to that as you say is probably a "disruptor" developing a solution outside of the industry but they'd need deep pockets which might limit the options to companies you may not like
Corporate NATS would probably welcome that. They just want to run an ATC service and have never liked being as much an engineering company as an ATC service provider.
Let’s be clear, NATS has no software development competence and little competence in what is now understood to be hardware.
I agree there is no real market for disrupters with NATS controlling a cosy market of incumbents.
Distributed technology doesn’t (just) mean having multiple ‘servers’ it means open sourcing capability and removing the barriers to entry that are currently so firmly in place.
NATS with its billions of turnover is relying on the innovators NOT being able to solve its problems - that’s the fundamental issue with a monopoly.